Let us pray for the soul of Richard Dawkins

You are on a deserted beach with a rifle, an elephant and a baby. This is the last elephant on earth and it is charging the baby. Do you shoot the elephant, knowing the species would become extinct?

This was the dilemma Richard Dawkins put to me during a weekend in the country. Our host, publisher Anthony Cheetham, had mischievously placed us next to each other at table. I thought the dilemma was a no-brainer - my only doubt was whether I would shoot straight enough to kill the beast.

He was outraged by my answer: man, beast, they were all the same to him and the priority must be to protect the endangered species. He berated me for my foolish belief in the specialness of humanity for its soul.

Dawkins's hatred of religion went on, as is well-known, to flower in television documentaries and, more recently, his bestselling The God Delusion. All faith is blind, rationality is anathema to believers and religion is the enemy of science: the tenets at the heart of the Dawkins dogma have been polished again and again and so widely transmitted that they have become common currency.

Dawkins is not the only world-famous apologist of secularist extremism. Christopher Hitchens is similarly critical of religion; so is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch MP who received death threats for her criticism of Islam. But Hitchens and Ali now operate primarily in America, a nation where 95 per cent of citizens believe in God and church attendance is growing, not dwindling. They can jab God and his followers, but theirs is only a faint note of discord, overwhelmed by the church choir.

In secular Britain, faith-bashing carries far more resonance and risks causing far greater damage. In this country, belief is a minority practice and believers a persecuted lot. The rabid attacks by Dawkins and his camp-followers spur even the most mild-mannered Christian, Muslim or Jew into a hard-line position.

But there is hope. In a recent interview, Dawkins describes a gigantic intelligence which designs the universe. He acknowledges that there may be an awe-inspiring and uplifting force out there and that he is prepared to encounter it. It sounds suspiciously like God under another name. Catholic schoolchildren used to pray for the conversion of England; nowadays, I'd settle for the conversion of Richard Dawkins.

For the only hope for tolerance is for him to publish a stream of new titles - The God Solution, The Selfless Gene - and address cosy church groups as an apostate who has seen the light. With their loudest persecutor silenced, believers would see no need for hard-line posturing. They would once again feel like ordinary citizens rather than a hunted species that must bare its fangs to survive.

But what about me?

Cecil Day-Lewis, poet laureate, Oxford professor of poetry and consummate ladies' man, was obsessed with his identity. He was convinced that people were always mistaking him for CS Lewis.

Day-Lewis's identity crisis, described in Peter Stanford's forthcoming biography, C Day-Lewis: A Life, lives on in his widow, Jill Balcon. Although in the 1950s, she was a already a well-known actress, Balcon always saw herself referred to as, first, the daughter of Michael Balcon, celebrated head of the Ealing Studios, and, later, the wife of the poet laureate.

She claims that today, everyone thinks of her only as the mother of actor Daniel and cookery writer Tamasin. 'Of course she's proud of her offspring, but even mother-love has its limits,' Stanford explains. Quite.